Rosemary Altea was
exposed as a devious, conniving hot and
cold reader by Penn and Teller in
their
Bullshit! episode on "Talking to the Dead." She was shown doing four
readings. She guessed right that two couples had daughters that had
committed suicide. And she guessed right that a young white man wanted to connect
with his deceased mother. She got nowhere with the fourth victim because she
had no knowledge of who he might want to contact, if anyone. He was a large
black man so she tried telling him that she saw a large black man trying to
come through but he wasn't biting and indicated he didn't know who that
might be. She got the young white man's mother because she was chatting up the
audience before the show began and she asked him who he wanted to contact
and he told her that he wanted to contact his mother. The camera crew got it
all on tape. She does a great job of
"forking" with this young man, however. She says something to the effect that his
mother is very chatty but she gets no positive response from the young man
so she quickly goes down another path and says "which is so unlike her." The
young man's face indicates that that's more like it. And off she goes.

The two suicides were clearly not guesses. As
Mark Edward noted in the
P&T episode: Suicide is not something you want to be wrong about. In fact,
Altea's agent brought both couples to the reading.

Recently, Altea appeared on
Larry King Live to assist in the ongoing
investigation into Sylvia Browne's misbegotten gift of oral dementia,
prompting James Randi to write: "It was hilarious to see Altea squirming
about while trying not to damn Browne too obviously. I'm sure she saw the
wide-open position on the psychic roster that Browne was preparing to
involuntarily vacate, and could easily picture herself in that cozy and very
lucrative spot!"*
Randi was referring to Browne's having told Shawn Hornbeck's parents, Pam
and Craig Akers, that he was dead four years ago, when in fact he was and is
still alive. Browne made her claim on the Montel Williams show on February
12, 2003. Shawn was recently found alive, living with Michael J. Devlin.
Browne told the Akers that Shawn was "no longer with us" and that his body
would be found beneath two large boulders that "seem out of place in that
area." She said he was taken by a "dark-skinned man" who wasn't black but
Hispanic and who wore dreadlocks and was "really tall." Devlin, a pizza
parlor manager, is not dark-skinned, not really tall, and doesn't wear
dreadlocks.

Altea told King that "Most of us, in fact, have some psychic
ability, we have some instinct, some understanding of a connection beyond
this world....I have a daughter. My beautiful princess. She is not psychic.
I would not dream of teaching anybody to have psychic abilities because I
can't. You have a natural ability or you don't." Then, she added: "...there are many, many people out there who have
this incredible and
beautiful gift -- and it is a gift....It is a very rare gift. And we have
that gift and we treat it with respect."

Interesting. Many, many people - most of us, in fact - have this rare
gift. Sounds like Madison Avenue trying to convince us that we can each be
unique if we buy the same product.

(And, yes, Larry did say "I once interviewed the guy
who invented ESP.")*

Psychic nonsense may be the darling of American television, but in
England there are small signs that the attraction is dwindling. Jonathan
Cainer, who calls himself an astrologer, opened a
Psychic Museum in Stonegate,
York, in 2003. He is closing the doors in 2007 because he is getting only
about 100 customers a week. He says he will reopen but he doesn't know when.
"Although I'm in the prediction business," he says, "I don't believe you can
make predictions about things you are close to."*

Right. It is much better to make predictions about things you know absolutely
nothing about.

Bob Park calls it "an embarrassment
to science."*
It may have been an embarrassment to Princeton University as well, but for
the past quarter of a century several paranormal scientists have conducted
ESP and
PK experiments in the
basement of the university's engineering building. At the end of this month,
Robert Jahn's Princeton
Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab will shut down. Jahn, now 76, used
to make contributions to the science of jet propulsion. He gave that up for
work that tried to find some small effect of the mind on random event
generators. He says that "If people don't believe us after all the
results we've produced, then they never will."

His support came not from the university or the government, but from
private parties. He collected more than $10 million over the years from the
likes of his friend James McDonnell, a founder of the McDonnell Douglas
Corp. McDonnell also funded the
McDonnell Laboratory for
Psychical Research at Washington University that was bamboozled by
James Randi, Steve Shaw (a.k.a.
Banachek), and Mike Edwards from
1979-1983.

Jahn attracted a few scientists to his work, but none of Princeton's 700
or so other professors joined his lab. His group didn't get anything
published in prominent science journals, though one editor did say he'd
publish Jahn's work if he could telepathically communicate it to him.*

South Africans spend more time at funerals than they do having their hair
cut.* About 1,000
people a day die of AIDS in that country, which has more than five million
people living with HIV.*
About two million South Africans have already died of the disease. In other
words, about one-fourth of the population either have HIV or have died from
AIDS. There are two main groups in South Africa fighting the AIDS epidemic.
Unfortunately, the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the Treatment
Information Group (TIG) spend much of their time accusing each other of
trying to spread AIDS and kill people. The TAC, led by
Zackie Achmat, fights
an uphill battle to get anti-retroviral drugs to those who test positive for
HIV. Every medical establishment in the world accepts the evidence that
antiretrovirals are beneficial. However, the TIG, led by
Anthony Brink,
Thabo Mbeki, the
president of South Africa, and
Manto
Tshabalala-Msimang, the health minister of South Africa, think the drugs
are designed to kill people and they recommend things like garlic and
beetroot to build up the immune system and fight off AIDS.

Brink has recently put his legal background to work in bringing a charge
of genocide against Zackie Achmat. He filed a 59-page indictment with the
International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands.

I haven't read the indictment but Ben Goldacre (who writes the
Bad Science
column for the Guardian)has and here are a few of his comments:

Brink "respectfully submit[s]" that the international criminal court
should punish Achmat with "permanent confinement in a small, white, steel
and concrete cage, bright fluorescent light on all the time ... warders
putting him out only to work every day in the prison garden to cultivate
nutrient-rich vegetables, including when it's raining"....

....Achmat should be forced to take his HIV medication ("which he
claims to take") and it should be "pushed if necessary down his
forced-open gullet with a finger, or, if he bites, kicks and screams too
much, dripped into his arm".

And how will this forced administration be possible? He should be,
white barrister Anthony Brink respectfully submits, "restrained on a
gurney with cable ties around his ankles, wrists and neck ... until he
gives up the ghost on them, so as to eradicate this foulest, most
loathsome, unscrupulous and malevolent blight on the human race, who has
plagued and poisoned the people of South Africa".*

No doubt the ICC will give Brink's indictment the treatment it deserves.

Meanwhile, South Africa must endure Mbeki for at least two more years. In
his recent state of the union address, he devoted just one paragraph of his
18-page speech to the issue of HIV/AIDS, saying the government would
intensify the campaign against the pandemic and improve treatment,
prevention and care.*
How reassuring that must sound to his subjects. Mbeki spent most of his
speech talking about crime, even though twenty times more people die of AIDS
than are murdered in his country.

I browsed through your website and found it useful. I would like to make
a contribution by suggesting some websites for addition to your web links
collection.

Her suggestions? Each of them involved going to a site called
Healthopedia.com, which is little more than a portal for thousands of
advertisements squeezed around bits of information. If you want health
information, don't go to Healthopedia.com. See your physician.

Camp Quest West is for girls
and boys ages 8-17. It is affiliated with National Camp Quest (Ohio), the
first secular summer camp for youth in the history of the United States.
Camp Quest was specifically designed for children of agnostics, atheists,
brights, freethinkers, humanists, Unitarians, or whatever terms might be
applied to those who maintain a naturalistic, not supernaturalistic, world
view. The 2007 camping dates will be July 8-15 and will be held at Camp
Watanda, about 70 miles north of Sacramento in the California Gold Country.

Camp Inquiry 2007, also for
secular-minded kids, will meet July 12-17 twenty miles south of Buffalo at
the Empire State Lodge within the Camp Seven Hills property in Holland, New
York. The camp is for children in age groups 7-12 years and 13-16 years, along with Junior
Counselors 17 years and older. For more information contact
Amanda Chesworth at a.human@mindspring.com.

Both camps emphasize activities that encourage critical thinking and an
understanding of science.

*****

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